Swift was intended from the start to not only replace Objective-C and all of its use cases, but also take on new use cases and bring a number of features from other languages that were newer and had different dominant paradigms.

Certainly having a juggernaut like Apple behind it has been instrumental in its success in achieving those goals. That said, a community-lead project with similar aims could probably achieve those aims as well, given enough time.

I think it's just rare for enthusiast-led projects to set out to do such things. My theory on why things tend to go that way is that the types of people to start programming language projects tend to heavily lean nuts-and-bolts and theory with a purist/idealist sort of mentality that's more concerned ideological purity than practical usability.

So to sum this all up, a community-run practical, multi-purpose, batteries-included language likely needs to at least partially designed and helmed by product engineer types so it doesn't end up anemic and stuck in an ideological rut.

Look at C++'s long in the tooth STL.

You don't want to marry a language to fast aging libraries you have to support for eternity. Better libraries always naturally emerge.

Rust's decision here is fine.

The only thing I'd like to see is the ability to programmatically limit transitive dependency count or depth in Cargo. I'd also like crates to specify whether they limit their own deps and whether they have panick-y behavior or not.